During the summer of 1998, following their high school graduation, Chris Conley and the rest of Saves The Day went on their first ever national tour supporting New England hardcore outfit Bane. When their journey began, nobody had heard of the band. But by the end of the run in Bane’s hometown, the local hardcore kids were dancing and singing to Can’t Slow Down, Saves The Day’s debut record.

The concert bill seems an unlikely match to someone unfamiliar with the band’s history. Saves The Day carried on to be a definitive voice in their class of bands — albeit a departure from the rough-and-tumble world of hardcore. But Conley, the 38-year-old frontman and driving force behind Saves The Day, says he owes a lot to the tour.

“That wasn't in our wildest dreams at that point,” Conley says. “We have a lot to thank Bane for.”

Chris Conley performs in 1999 shortly after the release of 'Through Being Cool'Chris Conley

Growing up in Princeton, NJ, Saves The Day came out of the local punk and hardcore scene. Every weekend, they saw shows in basements or the Arts Council, a local community center. Conley romanticized the music of another New Jersey 90s punk band, Lifetime. And the opening riff toCan’t Slow Downis a direct hat-tip to New York Hardcore mainstay Gorilla Biscuits’ seminal hardcore record,Start Today.

“The music that we played was more melodic,” Conley explains. “But we were coming from that world. Thank god fans of that music embraced us, otherwise there was nowhere to go.”

After a successful summer tour, Conley and the band’s founding drummer Bryan Newman started college at New York University. They were liberal arts majors — Conley took courses like creative writing, psychology and European history. He always figured that if music didn’t work out, he’d enter the world of academia.

By summer of 1999, the band had already recorded it's sophomore album,Through Being Cool,whichRolling Stonelater ranked as one of the greatest emo albums of all time. Over the course of that school year, the band spent weekends driving as far as Virginia to play one-off shows. The band slowly built a following and even did an entire East Coast tour over their winter break. Ultimately, they only made it through two semesters.

A polaroid from New Year's Eve, 1998, taken in Thursday's Geoff Rickley's New Brunswick basement.Chris Conley

“By the time we made Through Being Cool,” Conley explains, “We looked at each other and said, ‘We gotta take next year off and see what happens.’ Here I am, across time, still doing it.”

Twenty years since Saves The Day released its debut album, the band is back with its ninth record, appropriately titled 9. Conley, the only remaining founder of the band, wrote it as a retrospective of his life told through his relationship with music.

“It goes all the way back to my very first memories of my heartbeat,” Conley says. “The birds outside my window and then the radio. I never needed anything else. I was excited about music from day one. My cup was overflowing.”

9 is Saves The Day’s first album since its 2013 self-titled release. In the years between, the band has toured quite a bit. Conley also kept busy playing in a band called Two Tongues with Say Anything creative Max Bemis. And he was writing non-stop — he surmises he may have written as many as 80 songs since the last album.

These days, Conley lives in Chico, CA and spends time with his 13-year-old daughter, Luella. When they’re together, he takes her to school and piano lessons. On the weekends, he plays the role of chauffeur.

Conley and his daughter, Luella, 2017Instagram: @chrislaneconley

“She's a cool teenager,” Conley says. “She hasn't completely shut me out of her world. We'll sit there and hang out and enjoy one another's company.”

On days when his daughter is with her mother, whom he amicably separated from, he’ll take his dog to the park, spend a few hours reading and listen to vinyl before hitting the studio.

“I have a hundred books scattered around my living room right now,” Conley says laughing. “I'm a madman with it.”

Butfatherhood wasn’t something Conley was particularly ready for. His daughter was born when he was only 25 years old. And while he’s a more seasoned parent than many of his punk contemporaries, that doesn’t make him an expert.

“It’s not something you can necessarily plan for,” he says. “All of a sudden, you're in it and you gotta learn how to swim. I'm still a punk kid, who's now a punk dad. What's amazing about raising kids is that it happens naturally. If you're lucky enough to have a good kid who's not raising hell, it's really fun.”

Irving Plaza, New York City, 2014Derek Scancarelli

A few years before Conley became a dad, Saves The Day experienced a sudden burst of success. In 2001, after releasing its third album, Stay What You Are, the band hit the road for an arena tour opening for Weezer, who was hot off the release of its self-titled record most commonly referred to as The Green Album. It wasn’t long until the band’s video for “At Your Funeral” started getting heavy rotation on MTV. The following summer, Saves The Day went out as the opening act on the Pop Disaster Tour alongside Green Day and Blink-182. They played a sold-out Madison Square Garden. Conley remembers seeing 30,000 lighters in the air while Billie Joe Armstrong sang “Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life).” Everything was coming up roses.

“All of a sudden, you're on tour with your heroes,” Conley says. “Being 22 years old, that's really young. I sing about that on the new record, that exact era and how wild it was. There was pyrotechnics and everything, but other than that, it was just a bunch of guys that grew up playing punk rock. Everybody was all part of the same world of music. There was a sense of appreciation. Everybody knew that it was a special moment.”

That’s only one glimpse into Saves The Day history as reflected in 9, which was recorded in Nashville and produced by the band’s guitarist Arun Bali. They tracked the record over the course of a month in a 100-year-old mansion with some classic gear. This helped them find tones in the vein of the vintage records they hold so dear, such as Led Zeppelin I and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardustand the Spiders from Mars.

“That's the first time the band has ever learned the songs on the spot,” Conley says. “Usually I'll send out demos way ahead of time, but this time I thought, Thelonious Monk had this theory that after take two, you lost the magic. What if we learned the songs and started recording right away? I think we were able to capture a cool energy.”

Bassist Rodrigo Palma, NYC, 2014Derek Scancarelli

As for the writing process, Conley explains, the tracks on the album informed each other, unraveling in a different way than ever before.

“I never would have thought I’d write a Saves the Day theme song,” Conley says of the opening track to the record. “It happened on its own and I thought, ‘That's cool. I don't know where I'm gonna go with that, but I really like it.’”

As time progressed and melodies continued to pop into his mind, he started to understand the record that was unfolding. The second track, “Suzuki,” starts with a nod to the band’s humble beginnings in 1998.

“I thought it was really meta,” Conley explains. “And totally strange. But I was having fun.”

The album’s relationship to Conley’s life in music continued to evolve from there. One track is about the band touring in a van, another, “Side by Side,” is a love letter to Saves The Day co-founder Bryan Newman — who Conley started jamming with in 1993, but left the band in 2001.

“I wouldn't be here without him,” Conley says. “Wherever we are, we’re together for life.”

The record caps off with “29,” a 22-minute song where Conley reflects over the entirety of his life. There are seven different sub-songs included in the sweep — for example, the movement “Victorian and 21st” is a reflection on the band’s notoriety at the turn of the millennium.

This isn’t the band’s first foray into writing long songs. On the 2011 album Daybreak, the record opened with an 11-minute number.

“One of my favorite pieces of music ever is the second half of Abbey Road, which is 17 minutes of consecutive music,” Conley says. “I could listen to that every day, three or four times and never get tired of it. On this album, I wanted to try something new. I wanted to write a longer song sweep than the second half of Abbey Road. It was incredibly fun.”

Besides aggressively expanding his song composition, Conley also entered new emotional planes with lyrics, addressing painful memories throughout Saves The Day’s trajectory. Over the years, the band’s lineup has been ever-changing and tumultuous.

“Blowing up and suddenly flying on planes to go play shows, that's when you start seeing some of rockstar elements creep in,” he says. “I never expected that would happen.”

“All of a sudden, people change,” Conley says. “I've had 21 people in this band come and go. A lot of those changes were really difficult. When you're so young, you don't realize what's happening. It was tough to see people that I had known for a long time, or even new members, change once the enormity of it all started to take shape. There was points of contention.”

Although playing The Garden, appearing on television and being wined-and-dined by music industry legends was a riot, the band was ill-equipped to internalize these experiences. The sudden change negatively affected the group dynamic. Saves The Day began to fight and lose band members regularly. For years, those were conflicts that Conley didn’t want to look back on.

“I was always ready to make the next record, find the next guitar player and get right back into it,” Conley says. “It was only now at this point in my life, that I couldn't stop reflecting. I was surprised my instincts were to write about these subjects. I didn't want it to be framed in a negative way. I wanted to show that all this was leading to positive growth, but a lot of it is still painful. There are songs on there that have melancholy in them.”

Chris Conley, NYC, 2014Derek Scancarelli

The timeline of Saves The Day’s member changes is a long and winding road, one Conley admittedly hasn’t addressed in too much detail before.

“The only reason that I was able to keep a level head was because I was relentlessly teased growing up,” he says. “So, I'm broken inside. But, it wasfriends you didn't want to lose, you know? Sometimes it's just haunting.”

Of the rotating cast of musicians that have played Saves The Day, Conley doesn’t speak with a majority of them..

“I think that's how everyone would want it,” he says. “It was a really hard experience, growing up on the world stage.”

A third person perspective might argue that the math behind Saves The Day’s history doesn’t really add up. If 21 people came and left the band, how could they all have been the problem? Is there a chance that Conley is to blame?

“Oh, absolutely,” Conley says. “I've made things difficult. I'm extremely demanding when it comes to the music. I want it to be exactly the way I want it to be. I also have certain talents that are more natural talents that are...you're lucky if you have someone in the band who is a prolific songwriter…”

Guitarist Arun Bali, NYC, 2014Derek Scancarelli

Conley explains that he began learning cello at six years old. The son of two judges, his family wasn’t musically inclined, but his parents sent him to a school with an emphasis on music. He was taught through the Suzuki Method, which doesn’t allow for reading music. Instead, he had to learn Mozart melodies by ear. As he grew, he translated his love for cello to the guitar. He was inspired by Jimmy Page, who on occasion literally played with a cello bow.

“By the time I was 23, I knew a lot about music,” Conley says. “When you're going from power chords and a few years later you're using minor seventh flat five chords and doing complicated harmonies — it's not something that everybody can do coming from a punk rock background. That was really painful when you realized, ‘Oh, this guitar part is not going to be able to be played. So, I have to take over.’”

He continues: “I certainly don't feel proud about any of it. It was really difficult. If I had had the skills I have now in communication, back then, it would've been a little bit easier, ‘Let's figure out how we can get that done together.' Instead of people feeling, I don't know, threatened or envious. I'm not one of these guys who thinks naturally, ‘Do it my way.’ I just really know what I want out of the music.”

Conley concedes that members of his band have probably seen him as a control freak, holier-than-thou or an outright jerk.

“I actually was, though,” Conley says. “I mean, nowadays when I work with the guys in the band, they're all so gifted. They know so much about music, so those conversations don't have to happen. But, they all know that, no matter how hard we work on a part, if I'm not happy with it, we're not going to be done working. That's really hard. But, that's the role of a boss. That took me a million years to learn. It's not comfortable for me. I don't think it will ever be. I'm more of a laissez faire, happy-go-lucky, sunshine and flowers kinda fella.”

He adds: “When we were younger, it would be more uncomfortable emotionally. I don't think I was ever a dictator about it. But, nowadays it's just understood. Even talking about it is something I am not comfortable doing, but, we're all grown men now.”

Saves The Day, 2018Alice Baxley

Over two decades in, Conley has engaged with as many fans as he has with musicians. At shows, it’s common for people to approach Conley and share intimate details about their lives. He sees it as an incredible bond that the band and fans have grown up together.

“Life is so incredibly intense and painful so much of the time,” he says. “Music has this incredible power. I never in a million years would've thought I'd be singing words and having these emotional connections. I could not feel more grateful. I feel like the luckiest musician ever. I have goosebumps right now. It's such a gift."

And in a world that feels constantly crazed — like everything is on fire — Conley is proud of his newest work.

“My contribution at this moment in history,” Conley says, “Is something of pure joy, not naïve joy. Joy in the face of it all. If we're going to do anything together, it ought to be something that we love. I've already written everything that I want to write about the dark side of life. I wanted this to be a sonic love letter.”

I am a multimedia journalist living in New York City. My work has appeared in Noisey by Vice, Vulture and many more. I currently work full-time producing videos for People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly’s digital network, PeopleTV. Previously, I produced radio shows at S...